by Shannon Hale
The books took to the air with a fluttering of pages and flapping of covers.
“ ‘Rich Descriptions of Amazing Places for the Curious Agoraphobe,’ ” Maddie read. “What’s an agoraphobe?”
“I don’t know,” Lizzie said. “It just seemed right.”
She flipped through, finding a chapter describing the Tumtum Grove of Wonderland.
“We should get this to Cedar,” Maddie said. “I’m worried we’ve been gone too long.”
Lizzie waved her hand at the comment. “Oh, Kitty isn’t that irritating. I’m sure she and Cedar have gotten along just fine.”
“I meant the Jabberwock,” Maddie said. “And it wanting to get us and… and my…”
Lizzie became aware that Maddie’s voice was quavering in the unsettling way that often meant someone was either about to weep or lash out like an army of sharp-toothed and singularly grumpy fairies. Both outcomes were equally unwanted, so Lizzie put a hand on Maddie’s shoulder and squeezed softly. She had a speech prepared about the dangers of ill-timed weeping and the awkwardness of fairy violence, but Maddie surprised her by giving her a sudden hug.
“Thanks, Lizzie,” Maddie said.
“You’re welcome,” Lizzie said, that warm gooeyness filling her core. What was happening to her? She let go of Maddie and lifted her chin in the air. “Let’s go save the day.”
CEDAR WOOD WAS STILL SMOOSHING BERRIES and mixing them with oil she’d found in Lizzie’s shed. Everything she did was boring.
Kitty Cheshire was still narrating. What was the point? Maddie wasn’t missing anything interesting.
Kitty Cheshire decided to make it interesting.
“The paint mixed and ready,” Kitty said out loud, “Cedar Wood begins to snuffle around on the ground like a pig looking for truffles.”
“I do not!” said Cedar.
“Kitty Cheshire disappears.” That part happened. Sometimes this emergency Narrator enjoyed disappearing without reappearing. The in-between-ness felt like bathwater. Like floating. Like being full of soup. “Clearly, Kitty Cheshire had been eaten by the Wonderland Grove Ghost that Cedar Wood knew nothing about. Surely Cedar Wood will be eaten next.”
“I can still hear you talking, Kitty.”
“Alas, the only thing left of people after having been eaten by the Grove Ghost is their voice, howling with sadness.”
“Or howling with madness, in this case.”
This game was hexcellent. And distracting. And helped Kitty Cheshire forget the Jabberwock for a few seconds and how even its name stood every hair on her head straight up, and sent tremble-wobbles into her knees, and scared her smile stiff, and how, even though she was far too big now, she longed to curl up on her mother’s lap and cry.
Kitty Cheshire regretted thinking those thoughts aloud.
Please come back, Maddie.
Lizzie and Maddie burst through the door, slamming it shut on what looked to Cedar like thousands of uncomfortably friendly pencils.
“I didn’t think-aloud about the pencils,” said Kitty. “So that means Maddie is narrating again.”
“You’re safe!” said Cedar.
“What did I miss?” asked Maddie.
“Boredom,” said Kitty. “Talking. Cedar snuffling like a pig.”
“I didn’t do that!” said Cedar. “Kitty just said I did.”
“That’s dangerous, Kitty,” said Maddie. “I read a story about it in the narration book. Once upon a time there was a Narrator who narrated things that he didn’t observe, but he was such a powerful and skilled Narrator, the characters actually had to do whatever he said. It was horrible!”
“Like being forced to live out a destiny you don’t want?” Cedar muttered under her breath.
“We should get to work,” said Maddie. She clasped her gloved hands together. “Hold the spoon, did Madeline Hatter just say, ‘We should get to work’?”
“That’s nothing,” said Kitty. “I was involved. I volunteered to help.” She shuddered again.
“Maddie is correct,” said Lizzie. “We don’t know how time is moving. We must retrieve the sword and carry it to someone who can wield it, perhaps Headmaster Grimm or Madam Baba Yaga. Surely the White Queen could wield it with panache once she returns.”
“So… where’s the book?” said Cedar.
Everyone looked at Lizzie. Lizzie sniffed.
“A large crab ate it.”
“What?” said Maddie.
“I didn’t want to alarm you,” said Lizzie, “but one of the flattish stone slabs in the floor of that last hallway was apparently a flattish stone crab. It seized the book from my hand with one of its pinchers and devoured it.”
“But… but… but…” Maddie couldn’t quite seem to talk. The thought of going back through that door made her so nervous the Narrator had difficulty thinking of an appropriate simile. Like she was made of syrup, maybe?
“No matter,” said Lizzie. “I read the relevant passage while we were in the library and now have it memorized.”
She cleared her throat and recited.
An afternoon in the Tumtum Grove is as warm as a tea party. Tufts of white sillyrose seeds float on the breeze. The spicy scent of primposeys mix with the musky purple odor of the resin dripping from the boles of the Tumtum trees.
Flowers are fond of the Tumtum resin and carpet the ground thicker than grass, drinking it in. The yellow sillyrose on its single, thin stems. The bright blue primposeys with five petals turning up like faces toward the sun. The tiny dots of white snowslips.
The Tumtum trunks are thick and gray, the bark creating long black stripes. Beneath the black soil, roots intertwine. Their canopies touch, branches crissing and crossing so no Tumtum tree stands alone. Their leaves are the size of your palm and perfectly round, and the kind of green that almost sings its color.
In the center of the grove, in the middlemost Tumtum tree, the vorpal sword awaits. Its blade is hidden, thrust into the bole of the tree. Only its crystal hilt sticks out, reflecting the colors of the flowers and waiting to be grasped.
Lizzie continued to recite while Cedar painted on the side of the garden shed, trying to match what Lizzie was describing.
“It’s looking almost right,” said Lizzie. “But it doesn’t feel quite right.”
“I’m sorry, I’m doing my best,” said Cedar.
“To make this painting come alive,” said Maddie, “we might need even more than words.”
From the shed Lizzie fetched a musical instrument. It was cut from rosewood, shaped like a heart, and strung with thin silver strings.
“I didn’t know you played the dulcimer,” said Cedar.
Lizzie sniffed. “I don’t. Not in public. So I advise you all to keep this performance to yourselves.”
Sitting cross-legged on the grass, she placed the dulcimer on her lap. Touching the strings with her left hand and tapping them with a small hammer she held in her right hand, she played a melody that to Cedar’s ears sounded strange, somewhat off-key, and yet thickly sweet and oddly beautiful. Maddie felt the song go down her throat like a warm cup of tea and tingle out into her fingers and toes. She didn’t mean to cry, but she did. That song was the sound of homesickness.
“Here,” said Kitty. She opened a tiny vial that hung from her necklace and held it under Cedar’s nose. “This is what Tumtum resin smells like. Cheshires spend a lot of naptime in the branches of Tumtum trees. I brought some resin with me to remind me of home.”
The music and the scent filled the Grove, and Cedar painted. Although it was the first time she’d painted with real hands, they still knew how to dip the brush and work it over the wood. She wasn’t a wooden girl trying to imitate in paint what was real. She was so real that realness moved out from her and into the paint.
When she lifted her brush and took a step back, Lizzie said, “That’s perfect.”
“Thanks,” said Cedar. She felt alive and unpredictable. What other marvelous things might she be capable of?
“You’re different now,” Kitty said, “and not just that you’re no longer wood.”
“I always felt things, even if it was just my imagination,” said Cedar. “But I think I was also holding myself back, waiting to be real before I started living.”
Lizzie blinked. “You were not real before?”
“Well, my story says I wasn’t,” said Cedar. “And people like Faybelle always remind me of that.”
But her thoughts felt the same in her real head as they had in her wooden head. Had she always been real Cedar down to her roots?
“I think this can work,” said Maddie, inspecting Cedar’s painting. “I know it can, in a Narrator-ish way. But only because you’re you, Lizzie. Only your hand can claim the sword.”
“I am the princess of Hearts,” Lizzie declared. “I am an heir to Wonderland! And I command you to give up the vorpal sword.”
Lizzie reached her hand toward the painting.
“Careful, the paint is still wet,” said Cedar.
But as Lizzie extended her arm, the bumps and imperfections of the wood grain in the shed’s boards smoothed and disappeared. Lizzie’s hand went through the shed wall—or rather, went into the Tumtum Grove itself as if the painting had created a portal from here to there. Her hand wrapped around the hilt of the vorpal sword, and she yanked. With a wet buzz and a screech of metal, the sword came free.
Lizzie lifted it up, smiling, admiring the warm glow of the blue sword. It appeared to be lighter than Cedar had expected, and just Lizzie’s size, too, as if forged for her hand. Lizzie pressed the flat of the blade against her forehead.
“It’s beautiful,” Lizzie said.
“Isn’t it supposed to be purple?” asked Kitty.
“Is it?” said Cedar. “The description didn’t say.”
With a loud snap! the shed wall shuddered, and once again it was just a painting of trees, though now the painted sword was gone and the real sword in Lizzie’s hand had turned a bright purple.
“For a minute it was real,” said Cedar. She put out her hand but couldn’t reach into the Tumtum Grove. She brought back her fingers wet with paint. “So real. And now it’s wood again. Wood covered up with pretty paint, dead wood pretending to be… be alive.…”
Cedar stopped. Her chin trembled.
The Narrator gave Cedar a hug.
“I wish stories were kinder to their characters,” Maddie said. “But I guess trouble is more interesting to read about.”
A second shudder—not just the shed this time but the ground beneath their feet. The bubble around the Grove popped. The sky was no longer tinged with yellow but a bright, hot blue. Cedar could see out forever, all the way to the gray stones of the school’s towering walls, which were no longer caged by that yellow dome.
“The Jabberwock,” Maddie whispered. “It broke the magical barrier.”
She remembered the great beast hurling itself at the barrier, clawing at the magic, trying to smash through. Maybe frustrated that it couldn’t find the Wonderlandians in the school, it had turned its attention again to that other Wonderlandian it had sensed: the Mad Hatter.
Maddie started to run. She didn’t turn back to observe if the other girls were coming, too, as a good Narrator should. She was thinking about her dad, and how he made her charm blossom tea when she was confused and lavender tea when she was too happy to fall asleep, and how he was always smiling around those huge teeth that didn’t seem to quite fit in his mouth. He was the silliest person in the world, and she loved him more than hats and tea and hopping combined.
Maddie fled the Grove and raced toward the school, watching the sky.
“If the Jabberwock gets to Book End, that’ll be it,” Cedar said, running from behind Maddie. “The story will be over. No chance to undo the magic. Raven always a raven, Apple always an apple, and—”
“We know! Silence!” Lizzie said, but she sounded more worried than angry.
“Where are the teachers?” said Cedar. “Madam Baba Yaga! Headmaster Grimm! We have the vorpal sword! Come get it and take care of the Jabberwock!”
“There they are!” said Lizzie.
Just over the rise, the green grass of the croquet field near the school had changed to perfect squares of black and white. Cedar could see the silhouettes of Headmaster Grimm, Baba Yaga, and a handful of other faculty members. Why were they holding so still?
“Curiouser and curiouser…” Kitty whispered, her sharp eyes picking up what the others could not yet see.
The girls stopped on the rise. The teachers were still as marble. As stone. As giant chess pieces on the chessboard lawn.
The Jabberwock had broken the barrier. Its magic was spreading.
“No,” Cedar whispered.
And then the Jabberwock itself arrived.
As one, the four girls dropped flat to the ground behind some rosebushes. The thorns grazed Cedar’s arms, leaving thin red scratches.
The wind made by the Jabberwock’s great wings knocked over several of the faculty chess pieces as it hovered over them, sniffing the air. Wherever its shadow grazed, plants turned to paper, grass turned to chessboards, benches ran away, rocks popped and stones deflated, and the world turned mad.
“But we have the sword,” Cedar said sadly. “The teachers were supposed to use it and defeat the… the—”
And then the Jabberwock took off faster than Cedar had thought possible. Directly toward them.
“Don’t see us, don’t see us, don’t see us,” Maddie muttered.
Don’t see us, don’t see us.…
The Jabberwock passed over their heads. It landed heavily in the Grove, sinking its claws into the grass. It inhaled. The color was sucked out of the plants. Trees wilted. Flowers turned gray as ashes. Grass dried up. The Jabberwock was sucking the Wonder out of the Grove.
Lizzie made a heartbreaking strangled sound. Maddie put her hand over Lizzie’s mouth.
The Jabberwock’s head swiveled in their direction, its huge gray nostrils sniffing. And Cedar knew it was over. They were about to become buttered bandersnatches.
A shout.
“Halloo! Halloo!”
Someone was running across the Troll Bridge from Book End, directly toward the Jabberwock, and waving his arms. Trying to get the beast’s attention away from the girls shivering inside the bushes.
“No, Dad,” Maddie said.
“Halloo and yoohoo!” called the Mad Hatter. “Nothing for you there, beastie! Come have a spot of tea with me!”
The Jabberwock took to the air and zoomed toward the Hatter. Maddie got up to run to him, to put herself between her father and the monster.
Kitty grabbed Maddie. “I know what you’re planning to do. I can hear your narration. But you can’t stop it now. Stay down.”
“What’s he doing?” Maddie said. “The Jabberwock will take him, too, and—”
“He’s trying to keep the Jabberwock both away from us and out of Book End, to keep the story going,” said Kitty.
The beast nose-dived at the Mad Hatter, picked him up with a clawed foot, and swooped away from Book End and back toward the school. It went straight through a wall, the stones toppling easily, falling lightly and soundlessly to the ground like empty gift boxes.
Maddie realized all three girls were holding her, hugging her. If they hadn’t been, she was certain she would have forgotten how to keep standing up and fallen to the ground. She had to keep observing, keep narrating, now more than ever, or the story would end with her dad captured by that monster.
“What about the other faculty?” said Cedar. “The ones on the field trips to the East, West, and South Winds. They’ll return soon. Right?”
Cedar madly tapped at her MirrorPhone, but the spreading of the Jabberwock magic had knocked them out-of-area again.
Maddie shook her head. She was struggling with yet another unfamiliar sensation: annoyance. Just where were all those responsible adults who should have been taking care of things like terrifying magically mad beasts that wa
nt to rearrange reality and steal your dad and transform your best friend into a bird and ruin an otherwise lovely afternoon?
Lizzie was staring back at the ruined Grove, her arms dangling at her sides, the sword dragging in the dirt.
When she turned, her expression was hard as boiled eggs.
“We do not need the teachers. We survived here with the broken things, the crooked things, the things Jabberwocked and gibbering. Time cannot be wasted waiting for them to return, when they’ll just be turned into chess pieces. That creature took Maddie’s dad and stole away our friends. The longer a thing is not what it is, the more likely it will forget the thing that it was before. The Jabberwock must be stopped.”
“What do we do?” asked Cedar.
Lizzie held up the sword. “We take off its head.”
LIZZIE’S HEART HURT. IT FELT WOUNDED IN there, barely pumping, as wilted and colorless as the beautiful plants of her Grove.
And that made Lizzie Hearts, who was already quite mad, even madder.
She stormed through the heart-shaped door with Maddie, Kitty, and Cedar on her heels. They were not greeted with bottom-of-the-well decor, restless furnishings, or shouting greeting cards, but with a simple white room with one normalish door and one dark purple carpeted opening that was door-sized. The normalish door bore a sign scribbled in orange crayon: JABBERWOCK NOT THROUGH HERE.
“That is not a trustworthy scrawl,” Lizzie said. “Someone may be trying to trick us into not taking the correct door.”
“Or someone may be trying to trick us into thinking they are tricking us, making us choose the trick door by saying it isn’t what it is,” said Kitty.
“Stop saying ‘trick!’ ” Lizzie shouted. “I’m tired of that word!”
The shouting hadn’t cured her knee-tremble and belly-twistiness as she’d hoped. Lizzie gripped the sword hilt harder. That Jabberwock would pay for what it did to her Grove.
She turned back to the “trick” door (sorry, Lizzie), only to discover it missing, replaced with an empty wall.
“Did one of you steal the door?” Lizzie asked.
“Not me,” Maddie said.
